“What are you doing here?” Nathan asked, grabbing my arm. Suddenly I remembered why I was here, why I had stormed in in the first place.

“I want my interview,” I told him, trying to regain some of the indignation that had sent me here.

“You’ll get it.”

“No,” I said, crossing my arms. “I want it now.”

“You want to do the interview now?” he asked, looking thoroughly amused.

“I—” I quickly realized that I was definitely not prepared. Not just for the interview, but for talking to a half-naked Nathan. “But we’re going to decide when it’s going to happen. Right now.”

“We could have talked about this outside,” he said, lowering his voice. People were staring, after all.

“You left!” I told him. “You walked away from me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking somewhat reproachful. He ran a hand through his wet hair. “It’s just, well, after last night. I was just disappointed.” He leaned in closer to me and it took everything in my power to not just melt into a puddle at his feet. If he had smelled good to me before, this after practice, sweaty pheromone version of himself was almost too much to bear. “I thought we were having a good time.”

He looked so hopeful, so earnest, that I wanted desperately to kiss him. Instead, I leaned back and tried to ignore the disappointment that came over his face.

“I can’t,” I told him.

“I know,” he said.

“It’s better for both of us if I can just finish the interview and get out of your hair,” I told him, though I hated saying it. Like I had told Mandy, I barely knew him, but I felt a bittersweet twinge at the thought of not seeing him again. It was unreasonable, I tried to remind myself, but the sadness remained.

From the look on Nathan’s face, I could tell he was feeling a variation of the same. Maybe not sad, but definitely disappointed.

“It’s nothing personal,” I said gently, putting a hand on his shoulder. I wished it could be personal. I wished things were different. I also wished I had kept my hands to myself. Stupid Sophie. His skin was warm and wet and wonderful, and I regretted the touch immediately. Quickly I pulled back my hand, but my palm still tingled.

He looked at me with a now familiar heat. “I know.” He glanced away and took a deep breath. Suddenly we were back to interviewer and subject. The way it was supposed to be.

I gave him one of my don’t-be-mad smiles. “Tell you what,” I offered. “If you let me interview you tonight, I’ll let you pick the place.”

Chapter Eleven

He chose a bar. Not just any bar, but an extremely noisy one directly across the street from my hotel, called Stubbs. One with peanut shells on the floor and sticky spots all over the table and five-dollar pitchers. A bar filled with people who only seemed to be able to communicate by shouting at each other. One with a stage that looked like it was going to be occupied at some point in the evening by a local band, but not be able to properly support their entire weight. The whole place had a live-in, neighborhood-dive-bar kind of feel. The kind of place my mom usually found her latest paramour. The kind of place I had essentially grown up in. And probably the worst possible place to try to record a conversation.

But I wasn’t going to let Nathan deter me. He was clearly still nervous about the interview, but I was losing my patience. All I was doing was my job. He knew that I was coming, he knew what I was here for. I put my recorder on the table in defiance, in between our beers. He raised an eyebrow at it but didn’t say anything.

I had prepared for this evening like I was preparing for war. A war of civility and charm. Everything I was wearing was meant to make him feel comfortable but not too comfortable. My lips were red, but not too red, my smile friendly but not flirtatious. My shirt was snug, not tight, and my hair was straight and pulled back in a ponytail. I had made myself attractive but slightly aloof. Last night I had let my guard down and boundaries had been tested. I could still feel Nathan’s breath tickling my ear, his voice low and sexy, his fingers brushing aside my wild hair. If the song hadn’t interrupted us, I would have let him have his way with me. And I would have had my way with him back. But we both knew that was a bad idea. Clearly he felt the same if he had chosen to do our interview in such a loud, public place. So tonight I was a professional. I was here to do a job. But I couldn’t deny that I got a certain little thrill from the thought that I made him as nervous as he made me.

“So,” I said, sliding my phone, recording app cued up and ready, closer to him. “Tell me what you love about baseball.”

He raised his eyebrows at me and crossed his arms. His shirt was stretched across his gorgeous chest, straining against the muscles in his shoulders and biceps. Everything he wore fit him perfectly, molded to his lean form.

Before, he could answer, however, there was a loud commotion from the other end of the bar where the stage was.

“Great,” Nathan said with a smile. “The band is setting up.”

I glanced over my shoulder to confirm and did a double take. You had to be fucking kidding me, I thought, as I watched Nick and his band set up their instruments on the rickety stage.

“Dammit,” I muttered to myself, turning my back to the stage completely. This was the last thing I needed right now. “Can we go somewhere else?” I asked, hating the pathetic way the question came out of my mouth.

“Why?” Nathan asked, popping a peanut into his mouth and tossing the shells on the floor like the rest of the patrons. “Not a fan of the band?”

“You could say that,” I responded through gritted teeth.

“I’ve heard they’re pretty good,” he said. “Not from around here, though.”

“They’re from Houston,” I told him, getting up from the table. “Can we please go somewhere else?”

“Isn’t that where you’re from?” Nathan asked.

“Yep,” I said, standing next to the table, making eyes at the door.

“Great,” Nathan smiled. “Then they should make you feel right at home.”

But before I could answer, I heard Nick’s voice crackle through the microphone.

“Good evening, Austin,” the baritone I had once found sexy called out to the crowd. For all his personal faults, Nick was a great performer. It was the reason I had fallen for him in the first place. Seeing him on stage was seeing the most attractive version of himself. It was the rest of the time that had been problematic.

Why was he here? My ego would have liked to believe that he regretted breaking up with me and had followed me to Austin in an attempt to win me back with some big romantic gesture, but my logical side remembered that when he had broken up with me, he had had no idea where I was, just that I wasn’t there. This whole thing had to be the world’s worst coincidence. Unless…

I glanced over at Nathan who was looking up at the stage with a smile on his face. I hadn’t pegged him as the kind of guy to plan something like this—to purposefully take me to a place where my ex-boyfriend was playing—but I also knew that I had let myself be half-blinded when it came to him.

“Let’s just stay for their first set,” he said, his eyes twinkling. I really didn’t want to believe he had done this on purpose, but what other explanation was there?

Then I heard the familiar first chords of a song I had hoped never to hear again. I sat down.

“This is a song about a girl I knew,” Nick said, and I could hear Anne Marie’s stupid little tambourine jangling in the background. This song, this awful, stupid song that I had once found terribly sexy and romantic, had never had a tambourine in it before. That bitch, I thought. My boyfriend wasn’t enough for her; she was even moving in on my song.

The band joined in, pretty much drowning out the tambourine, but my relief was short-lived as Anne Marie began crooning into the microphone. She was singing now too? Guess sleeping with Nick really was the best option for her, career-wise. I wanted to be more annoyed at her, but I couldn’t help but admire the girl’s moxie. It also helped that the entire audience winced when she started in on her off-key ooh-la-las—another new addition to the song.